As the role of the Internet grows in business, enterprises are investing significant resources in developing intuitive, informative and easy-to-use Web-sites. In fact, sophisticated Web-sites are critical to the business model of many enterprises—whether those enterprises are traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, e-commerce retailers, vendors, or suppliers. These sophisticated Web-sites are difficult to build and equally as difficult to maintain. Because of these difficulties, enterprises are understandably protective of their Web-site content and are reluctant to integrate new functionality or implement desired changes.
Sophisticated Web-sites need the ability to efficiently modify their content, monitor a user's browsing activities, and/or control the user's navigation through the Web-site. These functions, for the most part, can be integrated directly into an enterprise's Web-site code. (The enterprise's Web-site code is referred to as “stored Web content,” and can include content, presentation instructions, embedded code, operational code, and/or any combination of the above.) When an e-commerce retailer, for example, wants to add an “On Sale” icon next to a particular product, the retailer usually adds code for the icon directly into its stored Web content. Of course, when the retailer wants to remove the icon, the corresponding code should be removed from the retailer's stored Web content. Similarly, when an enterprise wants to monitor and control the navigation of a user within its Web-site, code such as JavaScript is generally directly integrated into the stored Web content.
Modifying stored Web content, whether it be to add text and images or to add functionality such as monitoring and navigation control, is burdensome. Additionally, staff and financial limitations restrict an enterprise's ability to modify its stored Web content. In particular, in-house technology staffs are often not equipped or do not have time to add sophisticated functionality to an enterprise's Web-site. Thus, if these sophisticated functionalities are not readily available from third-party vendors, they are generally not implemented. Unfortunately, enterprises are understandably reluctant to allow third-party vendors to integrate functionality into their stored Web content because of the risk of increased downtime for their Web-site.
Because of the staff and financial limitations and the desire to protect the integrity of their stored Web content, enterprises generally prefer to implement certain functionality with only a minimal amount of changes to their stored Web content. In other words, enterprises would prefer to separate certain functionalities from their stored Web content. Present technology and Web-site security requirements, however, force enterprises to integrate much functionality directly into their stored Web content. Accordingly, enterprises often forego integrating needed functionality into their Web-sites.